GENNARO FAVAI. VISIONS AND HORIZONS

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Ca’ Pesaro - International Gallery of Modern Art December 17th 2011 – March 11th 2012 A major retrospective was inaugurated on Saturday, December 17th, in Venice, at the Museum of Ca’ Pesaro, aimed at discovering, tracing back and documenting, through more than two hundred works - including paintings, drawings, watercolours and etchings - the creative career of Gennaro Favai (Venice 1879-1958), a Venetian artist who succeeded in combining an extraordinary mastery of painting technique with the expressive needs of Symbolist poetry. Gennaro Favai was friends, among others, with Mario De Maria and Mariano Fortuny, and was able to move with equal ease between Venice, the lively cosmopolitan milieu of Capri and the great cultural capitals of the time. Set up on the 2nd floor of Ca’ Pesaro, the exhibition is divided, according to an “episodic” rather than chronological cut, into three main groups, namely: the “Venetian Views”, from his first phase, full of decadent and nocturnal accents; the core, represented by his “Mediterranean Trip” between Taormina, Syracuse, Capri and Algiers (in the ‘10s, ‘20s and ‘30s of the 20th century), with the creation of a new morphology of landscape characterized by intense colours and strong contrasts of light and shade of the Mediterranean light and, finally, “bird's eye views” of a transparent and visionary Venice of his last period. The path is completed by a section dedicated to his relationship with some of his illustrious contemporaries – i.e. Modigliani, Medardo Rosso and Raoul Dufy - of whom there are portraits on display along with caricatures dedicated to the Venetian, as well as a selection of self-portraits and still lifes made throughout the course of his artistic career, set in a reconstruction of the environment in his studio.PB